Archive for September, 2014

There’s a tradition in cricket, especially in Australia, that whatever happens on the field and whatever is said during the battle, you can always sit down at the end of the day and have a beer. I never met Prof Stenger, but I’d have liked to buy him a beer. We’d chat about fine-tuning eventually, of course, but first I’d love to hear the story about he came to be sued by Uri Geller. Anyone who’s annoyed that charlatan enough to end up in court has clearly done something very right. Then I’d ask about Super-Kamiokande. And then what perspective his electric engineering training gave him on modern physics. Then about the future of big experiments in particle physics and “big science” in general. Then about the time he met Einstein. Maybe we’d get around to fine-tuning.

While searching for news about his death, I found his final Huffpo article, “Myths of Physics: 2. Gravity Is Much Weaker Than Electromagnetism“. It’s about the gravitational fine-structure constant, which is (usually) defined to be the square of the (proton mass divided by the planck mass). It’s value is about 6 x 10^-39. The article states that “It is proportional to the square of the proton mass and has a value 23 orders of magnitude less than alpha.” Actually, it’s 36 orders of magnitude. I assume that’s a typo. (Someone tell Huffpo).

More interesting is Stenger’s final comments. In the article, he points out that what is often called the “weakness of gravity” is really the smallness of the masses of fundamental particles compared to the Planck mass. In his book “The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning”, he states:

All these masses [of fundamental particles] are orders of magnitude less than the Planck mass, and no fine-tuning was necessary to make gravity much weaker than electromagnetism. This happened naturally and would have occurred for a wide range of mass values, which, after all, are just small corrections to their intrinsically zero masses.

The [hierarchy] problem (as ably explained by Martin, 1998) is that the Higgs mass (squared) receives quantum corrections from the virtual effects of every particle that couples, directly or indirectly, to the Higgs field. These corrections are enormous – their natural scale is the Planck scale, so that these contributions must be fine-tuned to mutually cancel to one part in (m_Pl/m_Higgs)^2 = 10^32. …

It is precisely the smallness of the quantum corrections wherein the fine-tuning lies. If the Planck mass is the “natural” mass scale in physics, then it sets the scale for all mass terms, corrections or otherwise. Just calling them “small” doesn’t explain anything.

Interestingly, Stenger’s Huffpo article states that:

… a good question is: Why are the masses of elementary particles so small compared to the Planck mass? This is a major puzzle called the hierarchy problem that physicists have still not solved. However, it is to be noted that, in the standard model, all elementary particle masses are intrinsically zero and their masses are small corrections resulting from the Higgs mechanism and other processes. The hierarchy problem can be recast to ask why the corrections are not on the order of the Planck mass.

Now, unless I’m seeing things (always a possibility), that last sentence sounds a lot more like what I said than what he said in his book. Of course, I don’t think he’s conceding a solid case of fine-tuning. But he it at least acknowledging that physics as we know it hasn’t solved the fine-tuning of masses of fundamental particles. I wonder whether he thought that the solution would come from particle physics (e.g. supersymmetry) or the multiverse + anthropic selection.

In any case, a bunch of people who knew him have left comments over at Friendly Atheist. Seems like a nice bloke.